Painting on Ice

A couple of days ago, I asked Brad if he’d fill a dish with snow and pop it into the freezer for us to play with at a later time. Back home in Canada, Miss G really loved snow spray painting, and I figured we’d try another {more traditional} type of painting on snow once we got our hands on some paint. Well, Miss G and I found some really inexpensive acrylics while out and about yesterday, so I was excited let Miss G paint on snow using brushes today. The project didn’t turn out quite as I envisioned it due to the fact that our snow turned into a full-on rock hard ice block during it’s time in the freezer, but painting on ice was a really fun and unique experience too!

To start off, I invited Miss G to pick out our paint colours. I should have predicted it, but she went with Frozen-inspired colours since ice is frozen and all… Hah!

Now I have to say, if we were back home, I’d probably have used washable tempera paint, but vacationers can’t be overly picky, so acrylics it was. I added a little bit of water to each in order to thin out he paint and mixed it well.

Then I set out the ice block, the paints, and the brushes and invited Miss G over.

Painting on ice was really neat. The moment her paintbrush touched the surface, the paint would disperse and blend with the colours next to it, which was fun to watch.

Something Grae noticed while painting was that crevices began forming on our ice block during the painting process…

So to take it a step further, I asked if she’d like some salt to experiment with. She knows exactly what salt does to ice from the many ice excavations we’ve done, so her response was an immediate ‘yes!’. She sprinkled on some salt here and there and we patiently watched as it did it’s thing and left the surface even more textured than before.

Then, once she was ready, I took the ice block, gave it a quick rinse under cool running water, and placed it back in the dish upside down so she could start the process once again. ☺